After Christmas is before Christmas

I'm not sure the translation into English and the move to another event works with the title above, but really when you think about it, with a yearly event like Christmas you can really start the countdown directly after the 25th!

(For those interested, the original quote is by famous German football coach Sepp Herberger "Nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel (After the game is before the game)" and is very on the lips of everyone for all sorts of different events.

So back to my post. Christmas is well and truly over and the new year is knocking at the door which will feature in some future blog posts. But today we are already starting to think about NEXT Christmas with an early start to the Jingle Belles prompts for 2012 and I'm one of the lucky girls they asked to guest design this week!

"No time like the present(s)" is the theme and we were invited to use our gift wrap as a background or as an accent or cut out motifs from the paper, or we could make a card featuring images of presents.

I was very lucky to have received some gifts this year even though we were on a no present kick again so I was able to get crafty with the papers.

I made this card using the brown paper that wrapped each of my 12 embellishment parcels from Helen as part of our Counterfeit Kit Challenge Master Forger DT exchange (and I will be posting about those lovelies soon!). I cut some landscape strips and edged it with glitter after crinkling it up to give it some dimension. I glued down some confetti snowflakes that arrived in one of my Christmas cards and cut out some trees from an older KI sheet of paper.

And this one was using some of the kraft wrapping paper from the little Chance's presents to both of us. It was a lovely design so I decided to make it into a gift on its own and lift myself from one of last year's cards.

Jingle Belles have changed up the format a little for the new year and will be issuing a challenge every two weeks which means that I need to make at least two cards for each one if I'm going to have any chance of having enough at the beginning of December. So I started as I wish to continue.

I know it sounds crazy but it's never too early to start. Why not come on over to Jingle Belles and join in the fun?